"Teetering on the brink of a scandal"

People who have been closely following this blog (or indeed my life) over the years might have gathered that I once wrote a novel and, following a protracted discussion about its title, failed to get it published. Half of it has been sitting on the Authonomy website since said failure, where it has slowly gathered the internet equivalent of dust, albeit in the occasional quite gratifying form of nice comments.

Exciting as this news is, it is as nothing to my excitement that in the short time since they made this announcement, an anonymous commenter on the blog has pre-emptively accused me of blasphemy. Is it wrong to hope that one day I’ll arrive home and be confronted by people who haven’t read the book wielding banners expressing disgust and outrage? I can fantasise; the publicity would certainly make up for the demographic who have been vocal in forums in expressing the equally irrational view that nobody would ever want to read a book with Jesus in. Apart from the speculation about my religious proclivities, others have been wondering whether I’m a fake person altogether, made up by Scott Pack to con the general public. Perhaps if I drop hints in the right places I can persuade people that I’m Jesus himself paving the way for a comeback.

The truth is, as always, less interesting than all of those things, but it is quite interesting and if nothing else shows what a tough and rocky and irritating and unpredictable road the way to publication is, and in case it is useful or at least entertaining to other struggling writers I will share it in detail closer to the date of publication. So watch this space. This one here.

In the meantime I have to perform a not-insubstantial rewrite; whilst on Authonomy the book gathered a fair bit of advice, some of which was very pertinent and some of which just pissed me off and much of which, even the stuff that pissed me off, turns out to have had a degree of wisdom in it. So if that was you… ta, advice taken.

And in order that I might continue to benefit from other people’s wisdom, I’m minded to start putting up chapters from The Difficult Second Novel. So watch that space. That one, over there.